This is the English version of my blog http://sawiwirajaya.blogspot.com/

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Wednesday, December 14, 2011

Internet in Indonesia

Hello, world!

Internet connection speeds in Indonesia is ranked lowest in ASEAN, and it's among the lowest in Asia [1]. I'm not lying or exaggerating! Government agencies in Indonesia should be aware of this fact! I also have references to make things clear. Please note that numbers presented in this blog post is taken at the moment this post is written.

If you are not Indonesian, you may feel that your Internet connection is very slow. How slow is your Internet connection? Is that 2 Mbps (while the global average is 9.68 Mbps [1])? Well, it's not that slow, according to Indonesians. According to the statistics at Net Index (by Ookla), average Indonesians are downloading at 1.67 Mbps, ranked 150th among the countries [1]. It's ironic that fast connection in Indonesia is actually terrible connection in other countries [2].

The situation worsened when Google started to endorse cloud computing. According to Forrester analyst James McQuivey, "Every other software solution Google has tries to push you to the web rather than your hard drive. Google’s vision is that in the future everyone will have wireless high-speed access on any mobile or fixed device, so going offline to watch videos is unnecessary since you’re never offline." [3]

This situation is certainly not expected in Indonesia. While you have the convenience of having all of your data online, you cannot get much of it if you use Indonesia's crappy Internet connection. (The word crappy is actually an underestimate. It is even worse than crappy.) According to Sales Director of First Media Indonesia Dicky Mochtar, the ideal connection speed nowadays is at least 3 Mbps [4]. Indonesia's neighbor Malaysia even have attained this speed in their Internet connections [1].

This problem may be related to the number of underwater cables of which Indonesia is connected to. While many countries are connected to many, many cables under the sea, Indonesia connects itself only to a few cables [5]. I hope the government agencies to be well-read and aware of these facts, and fix Indonesia's Internet connection in near future.